Brandon Anderson has become a crowd-pleaser in Shadowbox Live’s
Underland.

Strutting around in a tall hat and colorful costume like a Mad Hatter and dishing out plenty of
attitude, Anderson steals scenes in the new company-created musical, which continues through May 1
9.

“It’s fun playing a guy in 3-inch platform shoes, with his knickers decorated in lace and
a hat the size of the stage,” Anderson said.

The show is set in 1967 in San Francisco but takes some inspiration from
Alice in Wonderland. Jimmy Mak, who wrote the script for the two-act production, was
thrilled when he first saw Anderson get into character.

“I said: ‘That’s it; he nailed it,’ ” Mak said.

Anderson, 34, portrays Mercury, a psychedelic-shop owner and speed freak during the “summer of
love” that marked the emergence of the hippie counterculture.

“Mercury knows where to get the drugs, what’s up, what’s down. His amphetamine use, his god of
speed, is the way he keeps up with everything going on in his community,” Anderson said.

Anderson and Leah Haviland, who plays Mercury’s wife, Harriet (inspired by the March Hare), have
made the
Mellow Yellow scene in the couple’s Psychedelic Shop an audience favorite.

“We’re always going for the laughs,” Anderson said.

“It’s a wonderful moment when the audience really connects to the whimsy in
Alice in Wonderland.”

Mak, the chief writer at Shadowbox, conceived and wrote the musical after writing Shadowbox’s
Tabloid the Musical,
Back to the Garden and
Burlesque de Voyage.

“I learned new lessons from each show because each was such a different musical,” Mak said.

“With
Underland, it was figuring out how close I could put the two stories together of
Alice in Wonderland and San Francisco in the summer of love.”

Among the other characters influenced by
Wonderland: Cat (Amy Lay), inspired by the Cheshire Cat; Mouse (Edelyn Parker), loosely
inspired by the Dormouse; Martha (Analisa Hartlaub), based on the White Rabbit; Father William
(J.T. Walker III), created from the Caterpillar; and Queen/Susan Lydon (Katy Psenicka), based on
the Red Queen.

“Like the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, Mercury and his wife, Harriet, have a tea party and
share what Jack Kerouac would call ‘tea’: marijuana,” Mak said.

“And, like the Caterpillar, Father William (whose name comes from a poem that Caterpillar asks
Alice to read) asks the ‘Where are you?’ question and offers . . . mushrooms,” Mak said.

Although several characters, costumes and scenery invoke the Lewis Carroll fantasy, Mak and
Shadowbox director Stev Guyer tried to ground the story in realism.

“If people don’t know
Alice in Wonderland,” Mak said, “we wanted them to appreciate the story on its own.”

Such iconic characters add metaphoric resonance to the poignant central story about a troubled
Vietnam veteran on a quest to find his daughter.

“This guy is trying to find his lost daughter after having blocked out the tragedy of his life
from his mind,” actor Robbie Nance said.

Having followed in the footsteps of his father, a Vietnam veteran, by serving in the military,
Nance found it easy to relate to his pivotal role as Albert Ice (loosely inspired by Alice), who
suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“What’s distinct about Albert is the combat stress that scarred him from Vietnam,” Nance
said.

“That got my Dad and I into a conversation about the level of care that wasn’t taken of Vietnam
veterans when they came back. So many of these people came back seriously scarred mentally from
their combat experiences, and yet they were mostly left on their own, without any real care or
support.”